I feel like I've hit the speaker's lottery this year, starting with SQL Cruise Miami, and it just keeps getting better! After a great trip to SQL Bits I'm now preparing for my travel to New Orleans for more great SQL fun! In early June I'll be speaking at Tech Ed North America, this year in New Orleans. I'll be presenting the same session later ...

My next guest is a person I have known for years, and have worked with on several occasions, Jason Strate (@stratesql). Jason is a very active writer and speaker (at my first SQL Saturday event, he spoke four times!), and always seems very busy. His blog (jasonstrate.com) had 23 posts just last month, and his twitter account is always active with ...

Today at SQL Saturday #220 in Atlanta I presented a new brand new session, ''SQL Server Query Plan Analysis: The 5 Culprits That Cause 95% of Your Performance Headaches.'' This session is designed to help people quickly analyze query plans and find likely culprits without being query tuning experts; I find that in a huge number of cases the root ...

On Friday, May 10 I will be speaking for the Knoxville SQL Server User Group, and on May 18, I will be speaking at SQL Saturday in Atlanta. Both days, my session is my old chestnut “Database Design Fundamentals”. It is my favorite session to do because of two things. 1. I love to talk about database design 2. No demos :).  The abstract is: ...

For this T-SQL Tuesday Bob Pusateri asked us to share how we came to love presenting. Before I ever got involved in computing technology I had (and still have) a love for the theatre, specifically musical theatre. When I was little the majority of albums (this was the 1950s, kids) we had were cast albums from Broadway shows my parents had seen ...

The best emotion to describe how I'm feeling is 'astounded'.  I'm astounded that I'm in such august company to be speaking the SQLIntersection (#iSQL) conference.  Read the blog post from my first SQL Server mentor, Kimberly Tripp, which tells you all about SQLintersection.Check out this list of speakers:Aaron Bertrand, ...

One of the best ways we can differentiate ourselves and further our careers is to get out of the office… and onto a stage. Presenting can give you name recognition; open doors to new opportunities; help you gain a deeper understanding of technology (teaching a topic often forces you to learn it at a much deeper level); and for many people it's ...

In the same way that the finest presentations involve much more than the simple relaying of information, the finest software demos are much more than just presenting features.  REMEMBER: The goal of a demo is to INSPIRE the audience to use the software/technology, not to teach them every nuance of software/technology.I've ...

I'm doing two new webcasts next week on Wednesday, December 19th, one in the morning and the other after lunch.   SSDs are a Game Changer for SQL Server Storage No, session is not exclusively about SSDs.  But this is my first session on IO and storage tuning that emphasizes SSDs over hard disks.  As Bob Dylan said ''Times, they ...

I admit it. I am tired and I have not blogged nearly enough. This has been a crazy year, with the book I finished writing, the pre-cons I have done (teaching is NOT my primary profession so I do a lot more prep than some others probably do), lots of training on Data Warehousing topics (from Ralph Kimball, Bob Becker, and Stacia Misner, to name ...